POWER OUTAGE TRACED TO DIM BULB IN WHITE HOUSE --- The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights

Friday, August 15, 2003

by Greg Palasthttp://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=257&row=0 I can tell you all about the ne're-do-wells that put out our lights tonight. I came up against these characters -- the Niagara Mohawk Power Company -- some years back. You see, before I was a journalist, I worked for a living, as an investigator of corporate racketeers. In the 1980s, "NiMo" built a nuclear plant, Nine Mile Point, a brutally costly piece of hot junk for which NiMo and its partner companies charged billions to New York State's electricity ratepayers.

To pull off this grand theft by kilowatt, the NiMo-led consortium fabricated cost and schedule reports, then performed a Harry Potter job on the account books. In 1988, I showed a jury a memo from an executive from one partner, Long Island Lighting, giving a lesson to a NiMo honcho on how to lie to government regulators. The jury ordered LILCO to pay $4.3 billion and, ultimately, put them out of business.

And that's why, if you're in the Northeast, you're reading this by candlelight tonight. Here's what happened. After LILCO was hammered by the law, after government regulators slammed Niagara Mohawk and dozens of other book-cooking, document-doctoring utility companies all over America with fines and penalties totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, the industry leaders got together to swear never to break the regulations again. Their plan was not to follow the rules, but to ELIMINATE the rules. They called it "deregulation."

>Has Dagger ever shown that she/he knows or cares that JFlosum is alive let alone what he or anyone else thinks?<

Zeus,

That’s exactly the way it should be, and the way everyone posting and reading Internet message boards should feel. It is certainly how I feel. I’m not sure I can remember ever getting upset with anything anyone has said but I do get bored.

That people are going to take cheap shots at Bush, just as they did with Clinton or every president that comes along from now to eternity is a given. I’ve just tired of it is all. It’s not interesting. This particularly piece of fiction is no more or less interesting then an others posted by cheap shot artists.

Carping and complaining and waling around in negativity comes easiest to folks with limited ability to actually use their brain for something positive. It’s much easier to tare a house down then to build one.

One of the things I admired about Clinton and now Bush is their ability to look beyond all that crap the cheap shot artist put out there and go about their business. I don’t think Bush Sr. had that same ability. Nor did Nixon or Carter. Reagan probably was the best at it.

The economy was heading for the crapper long before Bush had anything to do with it. Sooner or later people were bound to figure out that you couldn't sell everything under the sun on the web (even the crap people won't buy in person) and technology doesn't always make you make more money.

Sept. 11 pretty much took care of any chance this would be a small downturn.

It takes quite a while for anything anyone does to improve or hurt the economy to take effect. We won't know what Bush has done for a few more years!

Finally, why is it that the president always gets credit or blame? They aren't the one that stopped spending money! Just a question I had.

I don’t blame Bush, or give him credit. Contrary to what jcg thinks and others that just can’t get it through their heads, I am not a big Bush supporter… Or am I one of his detractors for that matter. But I am a big believer in trying to work in a positive supportive way with whoever is in the office, Democrat, Republican, Clintonite, Bush or a yellow dog in pink pajamas…. I respect the office and refuse to believe you can solve problems by “Carping and complaining and walking around in negativity”.

The jcg’s of the world could care less about who is in office or how good of a job they do as long as they fly the liberal banner.

Total undying loyalty to partisan politic is one of the major things wrong with this country. All parties, liberals and conservatives alike have some great ideas. But to many think it has to be all one philosophy. That’s bogus as far as I am concerned.

>Show Bush's positives, and I'll back off on the negativity.<

That’s not my job, as far as I’m concerned it’s “YOUR” job to find a way to be helpful instead of always trying to tear someone else down.